My contact with Bonhoeffer centered primarily on his most evangelical works until I had to choose a thesis topic for the Master of Sacred Theology degree. I finally decided on the Christological substructures of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. It was a topic that forced me to read wider in Bonheoffer’s corpus. And while working on that thesis I found myself face to face with what appeared to be two different Bonhoeffers; one that was very warmly pietistic and evangelical and the other a liberal German theologian.

Within a year of my profession of faith I came into contact with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The owner of the local Christian bookstore gave me a copy of The Cost of Discipleship. After giving me a brief biographical introduction he sent me away to read. Knowing about the man I had an instant admiration for him. What is more, The Cost of Discipleship resonated with my newfound zeal to give up everything for Christ. I was hooked.

However, my contact with Bonhoeffer centered primarily on his most evangelical works until I had to choose a thesis topic for the Master of Sacred Theology degree. I finally decided on the Christological substructures of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. It was a topic that forced me to read wider in Bonheoffer’s corpus. And while working on that thesis I found myself face to face with what appeared to be two different Bonhoeffers; one that was very warmly pietistic and evangelical and the other a liberal German theologian.

Let me give you an example. In his 2010 Bonhoeffer biography, Eric Metaxas puts the warm pietistic Bonhoeffer on display. He records one memory by a student of Bonhoeffer in 1933:

[He said] When you read the Bible, you must think that here and now God is speaking with me…He [Bonhoeffer] wasn’t as abstract as the Greek teachers and all the others. Rather, from the beginning, he taught us that we had to read the Bible as it was directed at us, as the word of God directly to us. Not something general, not something generally applicable, but rather with a personal relationship to us. He repeated this to us very early on, that the whole thing comes from that.[i]

One can find similar evangelical quotes in Bonhoeffer. In a 1936 letter to his brother-in-law, Bonhoeffer wrote, “First, I want to confess quite simply that I believe the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we only need to ask persistently and with some humility in order to receive the answer from it.”[ii]

[i] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville, Tenn: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 128.

[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditating on the Word (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1986), 43.

Read More